Mark McKinney is quick to correct a seemingly minor point when the subject of age comes up in an interview.

He had just been reminded that both he and Bruce McCulloch, the Calgary-trained contingent of Kids in the Hall, are now playing TV dads. For those of us who grew up with the troupe’s unhinged and perpetually youthful brand of comedy, it just seems a little strange.

“Technically, you’re wrong though,” says McKinney, on his cellphone at a noisy coffee shop during a tour stop in Boston. “I’m playing a TV stepdad.”

Well, that is technically true. McKinney and SCTV alumni Robin Duke play Jay Baruchel’s parents in the quirky FXX comedy, Man Seeking Woman. McCulloch, meanwhile, plays the moustachioed, no-nonsense father in the sitcom Young Drunk Punk, which he shot and set in Calgary.

It’s not that McKinney is defensive about the age question. In fact, it comes up frequently during his amiable chat with the Herald. Members of Kids in the Hall, who bonded on the Toronto comedy scene in the mid-1980s before gaining a rabid cult following with their seven-year eponymous TV series, have long since graduated from being Saturday Night Live’s weird little Canadian brothers. They are now comedy icons in their own right. When McKinney was cast for the recurring role in Man Seeking Woman, both Baruchel and series creator Simon Rich acknowledged the Kids’ influence on their own careers.

It’s just that, no matter how many years pass, things tend to stay the same, McKinney says.

“That’s the one thing about getting older is that you discover you don’t change that much,” says McKinney, who will be joining his fellow Kids McCulloch, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson and Kevin McDonald for a show Monday at the Jubilee Auditorium. “Maybe you lose some dangerous impulsivity from your late teen years. But the things that amuse us are still kind of the same. I think that comedy is either bred in the bone or learned really early, by early influences and experiences.”

Youthful impulsively is probably what led to McKinney’s career in comedy in the first place. He has come to the conclusion that it could not have begun in any other way than it did, with him wandering into Calgary’s improv pioneers Loose Moose Theatre on a whim back in the early 1980s.

Kids in the Hall is generally associated with Toronto, which is where they formed and where SNL founder Lorne Michaels discovered them. But McKinney says his brief years in Cowtown, where he came after flunking out of university in Newfoundland and abandoning his “dream of becoming Prime Minister of Canada,” played a key role in forming his comedic identity and strengthening his resolve for the lean years that would follow in Toronto. He came to Loose Moose at the same time as Norm Hiscock and Garry Campbell, who have both enjoyed long careers as comedy writers for Kids in the Hall and other programs. McCulloch, who grew up in Calgary, also showed up at Loose Moose while studying journalism at Mount Royal College (now university). The theatre’s open-door policy resulted in a trial-by-fire approach in those early years. Eventually, McKinney, McCulloch, Campbell and Hiscock formed The Audience before leaving for Toronto to find like-minded performers.

“In Calgary, I discovered something I can only describe as the spirit of the west, a completely can-do, DIY kind of approach to things that (Loose Moose founder) Keith Johnstone had set up,” McKinney says. “So we started in Theatresports. If I tried to think my way to a comedy career, I never could have done it. It was that I could walk in with Norm Hiscock one Sunday and be on stage the next Sunday. It was that open, that welcoming … The fact that we were able to take over the theatre at 10 at night and start writing sketches — weird sketches that the audience found really bad — emboldened us through the lean years we had in Toronto. That feels like a Calgary thing.”

Early on in Toronto, McCulloch and McKinney became known — rather unimaginatively — as Kids in the Hall West, while Thompson, Foley and McDonald were dubbed Kids in the Hall East. Of course, internal divisions have always been a part of Kids in the Hall lore. But after going their separate ways and to various levels of individual success in the mid-1990s, the Kids have frequently reunited for tours. In 2010, the troupe starred in a new series, titled Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town, for the CBC.

“Oh yeah, there’s still friction,” says McKinney. “But now I think we’re all mature enough to see it as a friction of brothers. The other day, I won’t say who, but when I was in a bad mood somebody else got into a bad mood on another issue. It stirred me up so much that I had a really good show. That’s just the way that families operate sometimes when they are complicated. But the time passing thing has just made us more and more realize that we aren’t going to get this flavour anywhere else and we have to put up with the irritants and rivalries and stuff like that and it’s not a battle to the death anymore.”

The new shows have McKinney resurrecting some of his popular characters, including the cheerfully horny and off-putting Chicken Lady and bizarre head-crusher. But there is also new characters and new material for old characters. It continues to evolve from town to town.

“It’s so much fun,” McKinney says. “I hate to use the word ‘blessing,’ because that makes me sound like the type of person I used to make fun of. But, it’s just really fun to still have a troupe that is still funny and still has a bit of edge and there’s still a lively thing on stage. Because there’s nothing like it. I do plays and I enjoy acting in them, but a troupe is a different beast. It’s just amazing we’re still going … 700 years later.”

The Kids in the Hall play the Jubilee Auditorium on May 18. Visit ticketmaster.ca

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